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Targeting

A federal appeals court slapped the IRS with yet another rebuke Friday, ruling that it did, in fact, discriminate against tea party groups and insisting the tax agency prove that it’s permanently stopped the unconstitutional targeting of groups because of their political leanings.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said tea party groups can’t sue individual IRS employees such as former senior executive Lois G. Lerner, but said the tax agency itself has not sufficiently proved that it has banned any future targeting. The three-judge panel sent the case back to a lower court for a more thorough ruling.
The IRS had insisted it “voluntarily” ceased the targeting, so the case was moot.

But Judge David B. Sentelle, writing for the appeals court, said that was clearly not the case because some organizations were still awaiting approval years after they applied. And he flatly rejected the IRS’s explanation that those groups couldn’t be processed because they were suing the IRS, calling that a classic catch-22.

“The IRS is telling the applicants in these cases that ‘we have been violating your rights and not properly processing your applications. You are entitled to have your applications processed. But if you ask for that processing by way of a lawsuit, then you can’t have it,’” Judge Sentelle wrote. “We would advise the IRS: if you haven’t ceased to violate the rights of the taxpayers, then there is no cessation. You have not carried your burden, be it heavy or light.”

The IRS didn’t have an immediate comment on the ruling Friday morning.

Hundreds of groups were subjected to the targeting, which saw the IRS pull their tax-exempt status applications out of the usual process, based on agents’ suspicions about their connection to conservative causes.
The groups then had their applications delayed while IRS agents asked probing — and potentially unconstitutional — questions about their activities.

After being caught, the IRS announced it was suspending “until further notice” its use of targeting lists to single out applications. The appeals court Friday said that suggests the IRS thinks it could restart the use of the lists. And Judge Sentelle said that doesn’t begin to scratch the other issues of long delays and unconstitutional questions asked of the groups.

The latest revelations in the never-ending IRS Scandal are pretty headline-worthy, but hardly a pip is being heard from the MSM, again. First, Judicial Watch has revealed, and the Department of Justice has confirmed, that the missing emails of Lois Lerner do indeed exist; second, that the content of one of Lois Lerner’s Blackberrys was destroyed after the Congressional investigation began in 2012.

The entire scandal has continuously had the makings of headline news: targeting citizens, evidence disappearing, perjury, and more. Yet few of the leading “news” outlets are bothering to cover the scandal with any journalistic depth.

“Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.”

This is in direct contradiction to what has been declared by Lerner and the current head of the IRS, among others, have stated about the emails and their recoverability, as well as possible perjury. “Current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the House Government Oversight Committee in June that the emails during the key period when the targeting occurred were “lost” due to a hard drive crash in 2011.”

With regard to Lerner’s Blackberry, apparently the IRS submitted sworn declarations late last Friday as a response to Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the case involving Judicial Watch v. IRS. In these sworn declarations, we find that Lois had two Blackberries. One was wiped clean after the Congressional inquiries began, without any attempt at data recovery. The second was issued in 2012, which the IRS still has. From the NY Observer:

“In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her “Outlook” and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.”

Unfortunately, these bombshells only serve to re-emphasize two things we already knew. 1) the government is not above lying and cover-ups; 2) no one in the mainstream media has the fortitude to cover the story in-depth. With CNN, CBS, and ABC News having all have direct ties to the Obama Administration over the years, we certainly won’t see any Pulitzer Prize winning investigations on the IRS Scandal at all.